New InfoSec Software, Instruction Architecture, and More This Week in Open Source

Open Source Wrap Up July 11 – 17, 2015

The NSA Releases an Open Source Infosec Tool

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has a long history of releasing open source tools, and they’ve recently released SIMP: a tool to keep networked systems compliant with security standards. This was released as open source primarily for other governmental organizations to use in order to avoid the need to duplicate work that has already been completed. Currently, only Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS version 6.6 and 7.1 support the software.

Shashlik: Run Android Apps on Linux

Shashlik is a new “Android Simulated Environment” that will server as a launcher to run Android applications on conventional Linux distrbutions. It’s a minimal collection of Android systems and frameworks that can be integrated into desktops, laptops, tablets, TVs and more. It’s official release will be on July 26, 2015 during KDE’s Akademy 2015, but the source code can be found now on GitHub.

SUSE Linux is Coming to ARM

SUSE has ported their popular Linux distributions SUSE Linux Enterprise to run on ARM processors built by companies like AMD, AppliedMicro, and Cavium, along with servers from companies like Dell and HP. Version 12 now supports 64-bit ARM processors and is a part of a push towards greater usage of ARM hardware in data centers to leverage the benefits of its low-cost, efficient processing. This release includes the addition of ARM support to the openSUSE build service to enable the creation of packages for 64-bit ARM hardware.

Open Source Core Makes Progress

RISC-V is an open source instruction set architecture that was initially started by developers at Berkeley and is based on established reduced instruction set computing principles. It is being explored as an alternative to conventional platforms like x86 and ARM, and it has already demonstrated some architectural advantages over these alternatives. Berkeley held a workshop at the end of June to gauge interest and development progress; it appears there are quite a few commercial operations underway to utilize this new architecture. The group discussed past work and achievements briefly, but put a bigger emphasis on discussing the challenges the project will face in the future.

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Author: Ben Lloyd Pearson

Ben is an open source technologist experienced in a wide array of modern IT tools. He's done a bit of everything, from web development, to systems administration, web publishing, and beyond.
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